Friday, March 29, 2013

At the start of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows, a young mother and her 12-year-old son Akira
introduce themselves to the landlords at their new apartment building. The
movers bring in furniture and suitcases, and when two of the suitcases are
opened up they reveal two younger children inside; then the older boy goes to
collect another girl from the station. The mother sits down with her clan to
explain the rules – except for Akira, who takes care of shopping and other
basic duties, no one must go outside (let alone to school), and there must be
no noise. Subsequent scenes show that
the mother is engaged with her children when she’s at home, but her absences
are frequent – she comes home late, and then disappears for an entire month
(she talks about a new lover who doesn’t know of her children. She returns for
one night, and then takes off again, this time without coming back at all. But
months later she sends more money and a brief note to Akira reminding him that
she’s counting on him, indicating that from her own warped perspective she’s
still watching over them and fulfilling her role.

Nobody
Knows

For a while the children maintain their established routine but as
the money runs out, the utilities get shut off one by one, the apartment becomes
a mess, and all four become foragers. They skirt round the edges of other
peoples’ lives – for a while Akira makes some friends but then they fall away,
then they become friends with another marginalized girl. No one notices them –
police and child welfare are mentioned only once, and Akira instantly rejects
the prospect, knowing from an unspecified past experience that this will split
the four of them up. But if their staying together is their preeminent
motivation, it’s also an abstract one. When tragedy hits one of them, the
others pause and carry on. In the last scene, the group has reached a sort of
stability, but the configuration has changed.

The film is fundamentally a tragic story of neglect and abuse of
course, but Kore-eda sees that the four children’s plight is also a freedom. Not
that the filmis a cousin of Finding Neverland – it doesn’t surrender
itself to an idealistic notion of childish imagination. Occasionally the
children exploit the situation (Akira goes through a phase of heavy video-game
playing, until the power is cut off), but for the most part they exercise their
autonomy only gently – for example by creating a garden on the balcony, growing
plants in old food containers. More broadly, Akira’s role as provider and
overseer contrasts with the mother’s childlike quality and the absence of
fathers to posit a shifting notion of family roles. But the film isn’t heavy-handed
or didactic or symbolic about this. I must confess that while watching it I was
often a little disengaged, and I certainly found it to be on the long side
(around 140 minutes). It’s only afterwards, turning it over in my mind, that I
come to appreciate Kore-eda’s range and subtlety.

Unseen
Films

The film is vague about the passage of time and logistical details
– it’s cool and poised and somewhat elliptical. Apparently it’s based on a true
story, but this seems relatively insignificant. It could be regarded as an
indictment of society, but I doubt that’s Kore-eda’s point. The title after all
isn’t Nobody Cares or Nobody Tries. There are many stories in
the city, and it is futile to make too much of any one of them. In one scene
Akira watches a baseball game and the coach, short one player, notices him and calls
him over to join the team. There follows a briefly conventional montage of
integration – normal life, it seems, isn’t so far away. But it’s at the same
time, that the tragedy I mentioned earlier takes place. The juxtaposition could
suggest some vague moral culpability on Akira’s part, and he responds by
shoplifting some supplies (something he’s resisted doing earlier), before
carrying out an action of great nobility. One could view Kore-eda’s objectivity
as contrived, or even irresponsible. I do think the film lacks the analytical
edge that might have made it great. But it has an almost mystical impact, and
it’s clearly one of the year’s best releases so far.

This is Kore-eda’s fourth film. I saw his second, After Life, about a counseling station
where the direction of the recently dead is determined. I liked it less than
the consensus, but maybe now it’s worth another look. His third film Distance made little impact generally. It’s
a little strange I haven’t seen his first, Maboroshi,
which I seem to remember made Roger Ebert’s top ten list when it came out. It’s
about what happens to a young woman after her husband unexpectedly commits
suicide.

I always feel embarrassed when I have to admit that I haven’t seen
some key film, although sheer mathematics make it inevitable once in a while. I
maintain a movie a day pace on average (I have a job besides this, and a wife
and a dog, so that’s as much as time can possibly allow) and if you reflect on
the volume of cinema history and the extent of production around the world (Variety probably reviews twenty movies a
week on average), it amounts to being perpetually swept further away from the
shore. Still, it does mean every year yields a crop of archival pleasures.
Already this year I’ve enjoyed films I hadn’t seen before by Olmi, Pasolini,
Murnau, Resnais and Wajda, not to mention Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks. And I think this might be the year to finally see
some of those long-deferred Fritz Lang silent films (Metropolis aside).

Inside
Deep Throat

Also on this list, although not particularly near the top, was the
porn classic Deep Throat. My
knowledge of this genre is exceptionally shallow, and comes mainly from various
documentaries (Wadd, the documentary
on John Holmes, is quite interesting; certainly better than Wonderland, the deadening dramatization
of his decline), but I feel I’ve been aware of Deep Throat in some vague way for just about my entire life and
it’s seemed – how shall I put this – suboptimal not to know the movie better.
Still, I’ve done nothing to plug this gap in my knowledge.

This has now been taken care of by the new documentary Inside Deep Throat, which presents some
of the original movie’s “key” scenes while reliving its cultural impact and
tracking what happened to some of the key participants. It’s by Fenton Bailey
and Randy Barbato, who made the surprisingly engaging and illuminating The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The new film is
more conventional (like every conventional documentary, it features Norman
Mailer) and I have to confess I learned very little from it. How I knew all this
stuff already I can’t tell you. Maybe if you grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, it
was in the water supply.

I
dragged my heels for a long time on seeing Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, but it was hard not to succumb once he won the best
director Oscar for it; the film is still playing in some theaters after five
months, even though it’s now available on DVD and on-demand. As the world
knows, it’s based on the novel by Yann Martel: I haven’t read it, which might
have been an advantage, if it meant an ability to view the film through fresh
eyes.

Life of
Pi

The
centerpiece of the film depicts how the teenage Pi survives for months in a
lifeboat after a shipwreck, sharing the space with a Bengal tiger. Lee has
talked about how long it took to get the technology to the point where the
animal could be rendered convincingly, and in this regard the film’s a significant
success – the tiger, along with various other animals of shorter-lived tenure,
is extraordinarily convincing, seldom showing signs either of digital trickery
or of soft-hearted anthropomorphism. This is no doubt Exhibit A in the case for
Lee’s award.

From
my perspective, it might be just about the only
exhibit, because everything else about the film is mostly dire. Early on, in a
framing device where the adult Pi tells his story to a visiting writer (in
scenes carrying the soppy ambiance of a Lifetime flick about two guys on a
tentative first date), the story is trailed, several times, as one that’ll make
you “believe in God,” and the preamble to the shipwreck, recounting Pi’s
formative years, is laden with intimations of significance. This starts of
course with his name, short for “Piscine,” which allows both a “quirky”
cultural reference, a scatalogical sounds-like detour, and then in its
shortened form a mystical, canonical harmony. What it all means, I have no idea
(like many things in the movie, maybe it made more sense in the book) but the
film lays it out there as though covering the selection of a new Pope. Indeed,
this is one of those films where no one ever just talks – everything is measured, calibrated, nuanced, and thereby
dead on arrival. Lee has always been known for his supposed sensitivity to
human interactions, but on this evidence that’s disintegrated into goory
affectation.

Then
in the end, as far as I could tell, the narrator abandons the spiritual line,
and the movie becomes a short-lived meditation on the nature of storytelling,
the unknowability of truth, or some such thing. This line of reflection wraps
up almost as soon as it got under way, to no great end that I could see,
culminating in the most unimpactful final minutes I’ve seen in quite a while.

This is
not cinema

Well,
I guess it wasn’t my kind of movie. So, you might say, I should just focus on
the bits I liked. But even there a queasy feeling sets in, from the sense that
you only like bits of Life of Pi for
the same reason you like ingesting crap pumped full of processed sugar. And how
could it be otherwise, given the vastly expensive commercial undertaking it
represents? The cinematographer Christopher Doyle, asked in a recent interview
what he thought about Life of Pi’s
Claudio Miranda winning this year’s Oscar for best cinematography, exploded
into a magnificently profane rant, of which the following is just one heavily
cleaned-up extract: “ I’m sure he’s a wonderful guy and I’m sure he cares
so much, but since 97 per cent of the film is not under his control, what..are
you talking about cinematography, sorry. I’m sorry. I have to be blunt and I
don’t care, you can write it. I think it’s (an) insult to cinematography. I’m
sure he’s a wonderful person, I’m sure he cares so much. But what it says to
the real world is it’s all about us, we have the money, we put the money in,
and we control the image. And I say…Are you..kidding? That’s not
cinematography. That’s control of the image by the powers that be, by the
people that want to control the whole system because they’re all accountants.
You’ve lost cinema. This is not cinema and it’s not cinematography. It’s not
cinematography.”

Doyle admits later in the
interview to not having seen the film, his point being in part one of principled
opposition to digitization. Well, as someone once said, you don’t need to eat
an egg to know it’s rotten. And once in a while, in matters of art as in those
of human behaviour, maybe it shouldn’t be necessary to go any further than “Are
you kidding?” Is this what we value and want to succumb to, irrelevant drivel
about a kid with a silly name, messing round with a tiger with an even sillier
name? Are we meant to be anything other than insulted when we’re fed a cheap
line of calculatingly multi-denominational “spiritual” pandering, and told this
might actually weigh on our metaphysical calculus? Are we meant to be such
idiots that we don’t care if a film makes no visible attempt to engage with the
world we actually live in?

Divine magic

Honestly, I don’t see any
meaningful distinction between Life of Pi
and one of those here today gone tomorrow action atrocities that invests
comparable time and loving care into finding gruesome new ways to kill people.
Whether we’re distracted from reality by violence and sickness, or by soothing
piffle, either way we’re not spending time on anything that might actually inform
and strengthen our engagement with our surroundings. Defenders of the film,
like the Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen,
tell us it “will definitely restore
your faith in the divine magic of the movies.” But Groen, I fear, has been
taken by the same con artists who undermined his “faith” in the first place –
drawn back to the table with a more artful illusion, and so happily opening up
his wallet of superlatives again. Start counting the days until the bubble
bursts for him again, cueing a woebegone “the magic’s gone” weekend opinion
piece.

Writing briefly here about
Lee’s last film Taking Woodstock, I
said this: “a truly great director
would never make something so shallow and slack. The film, depicting the
turmoil surrounding the classic rock festival, certainly has interesting things
going on in the background. But there’s not an iota of personality or texture
to it. It feels like an assembly, never like a piece of cinematic
writing.”Before that he won another
Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, which
of course was inherently more stimulating, even if the film’s real authorial
personality might almost in hindsight be Heath Ledger as much as it was Lee. Either
way, Oscars for two of his last three films constitutes grotesque
over-valuation. I mean, are they kidding?

Sunday, March 24, 2013

In Neil Marshall’s The Descent,
six young, thrill-seeking British women go caving in a remote area of
Philadelphia: five of them don’t know that the sixth has switched the game
plan, plunging them where no man or woman has gone before. And no wonder, once
they find out what dwells down there. The
Descent is a classic straight-down-the-line horror thriller. Marshall
supplies a punchy beginning so we know he’s serious, then kicks back for a
while, expertly establishing the quirks and tensions within the group.
Everything that happens in the caves, where fun turns to irritation and then to
anxiety and outright disaster, is superbly dramatized, with masterful
orchestration of light and space, rock and metal, physical fragility and,
eventually, monsters!

And except for the very beginning, it all takes place among women. This
allows one iconic shot in which the apparently most fragile of the group rises
slowly from a pool of blood in which we might have thought she’d drowned (if
we’d never seen a movie before); now ready for battle, as toned and steely as
Sigourney Weaver ever was. The movie as a whole is admirably free of Fay
Wray-type wailing and screaming. And its climax is a remarkably cold-blooded
settling of scores between two of the women. It’s hard to imagine a film about
males in jeopardy turning on quite the same dime, but The Descent takes the cliché about women being more in tune with
their feelings, and extrapolates it to a giddily gruesome outcome.

World Trade Center

Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center
could also have been called The Descent,
to refer both to the two Port Authority cops trapped in the rubble, whose
rescue the film dramatizes, and to the broader calamitous reality and
implications of what happened on September 11, 2001. But such a title would
already smack of “interpretation,” and Stone’s approach here is almost directly
opposite to the feverish speculations of films such as JFK; instead he adopts a “right thing to do” approach paralleling
the stoic professionalism of the two protagonists. I watched it in the third
row, consumed by the screen and unaware of the rest of the audience, and I must
say that I’ve seldom been so fully occupied by a two-hour picture. The
depiction of the event itself, concentrating on the blind chaos, the sense of a
world out of control, is especially effective. But even the conventional
opening montage of early morning New York City has an unusual fluidity and
beauty to it.

The film, concentrating on the agonized families, inevitably becomes
ever more straightforward as it goes on, although the execution remains superb
in all respects. The acting is all very fine too: Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena
play the cops, and Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal their wives. I don’t know
how it could have been carried off much better, so the question of course is
whether this is the film that was actually needed. The closing voice over tells
us that 9/11 reminded us of the many capabilities of man, and that it’s
important to remember the good along with the evil. But this seems to me a
simplistic paradigm, because we already understand the good better than we do
the evil, and in any event, neither is ultimately as important as the events
that were set in motion, and that continue to consume us. The film has only a
brief glimpse of Bush on a TV screen, and we must rely on the briefest of
remarks and reactions to suggest any broader perspective. There’s a reference
to Iraq in the closing captions, which could be taken as a subtle endorsement
of how 9/11 was used to justify that wretched initiative. But, if so, it’s so
subtle that you can’t make anything of it. It’s often been difficult in the
past to figure out exactly what Oliver Stone has been trying to say, but it’s a
new experience to have him apparently so happy to say nothing.

Brothers of the Head

Keith Fulton and Louis Pena’s Brothers
of the Head, a boozy, druggy, music-drenched documentary-style parable of
decades past, feels closer to what an Oliver Stone movie used to be, although
Stone never had this light a touch, and would surely have thought himself above
such apparently inconsequential material. In one of the year’s wackier
premises, the film depicts a pair of conjoined twins who front a rock-punk band
in 70’s Britain, flirting with success before their psychological and physical
frailties bring them down.

For a while, the film feels weighed down by logistics, with the central
characters too far in the background, but it gradually comes together, perhaps
working especially well as a new and fresh spin on old rock movie clichés; it’s
a very poignant depiction of creativity born out of, and of course dependent
on, extreme adversity. It’s also so good at evoking the unkempt lifestyle that
you may need to fumigate your clothes afterwards.

Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine was this year’s consensus
“discovery” at the Sundance Film Festival, and for once you can see what the
excitement was about. The raw material is familiar enough – a dysfunctional
family squeezes into a rickety old bus for a road trip (so that 8 year old
Olive can compete in a beauty pageant), and gets some of its rough edges
smoothed off along the way. But this particular version has lots of raw feeling
and many funny lines, even if a few too many of those come from the easy direction
of a foul-mouthed grandfather (impeccably played by Alan Arkin).

What’s most surprising is the film’s portrayal of a family living under
real economic constraints. Details like Olive asking her mother how much she
can spend, when they stop at a diner for breakfast, are rare in movies,
particularly with the naturalism we see here. The astute costume design and art
direction contribute to a feeling of uncommon depth and precision. And it’s
hard to deny that several of the characters really are losers, if only by the standards they’ve set themselves. The
title doesn’t lend you to expect too much bite, and indeed the movie could have
gone further; Greg Kinnear, as the father trying to make it as a motivational
speaker, sees his dream shattered, but we don’t know where that’s going to take
him. Instead, once they get to the pageant, it shifts into easy (if again very
well executed) parody and subversion. It’s a funny ending, but these pageants
are so flagrantly tasteless and pathetic that the target doesn’t seem very
relevant to where the film’s been going. Overall though, it’s only because of
the general high quality that one can raise these sorts of objections.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

The Chilean director Pablo Larrain has made three
fascinating films in five years, all dealing with Chile during the Pinochet
years, and so constituting a trilogy of sorts. His 2008 Tony Manero, set around 1978, is a portrait of Raul, a violent
criminal obsessed with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, and with embodying him sufficiently well to
win the top prize on a TV show – his murderous path to success includes killing
a movie theatre projectionist after Saturday
Night Fever is replaced by Grease,
which hardly seems like placing the blame where it belongs. The character
barely exhibits a shred of emotion, doubt or remorse; it seems his focus on
Travolta’s highly defined dance routines may represent some twisted desire for
a form of structure and clarity in an environment devoid of any of it. There’s
nothing so new about the notion of a violent hood with darkly quirky
aspirations, but Larrain never makes it feel like a pose, and his film is
quietly eloquent about the wretched environment – if Raul didn’t have this to
hold him together, he’d just be another of the exploited or the preyed upon.

No

Two years later, Larrain extended this notion in Post Mortem, set in 1973, at what we
gradually understand to be the exact moment of the military coup against the
government. A grim functionary, who makes a living transcribing autopsy
reports, obsesses over a burlesque dancer as his only apparent hope of getting
anything going in his personal life, then things erupt and he’s surrounded by corpses,
which however constitutes a perverse form of privilege; the film’s last scene
illustrates how war and mass atrocity enables embittered men to lash out more
intimately, enabling the spreading of amorality and corruption. Post Mortem is darker than the first
film, and less conceptually striking, but it confirmed Larrain as a filmmaker
of great resourcefulness, capable of evoking a rich engagement with a very
specific history without becoming remotely didactic (indeed, viewers with more
straightforward tastes might find the films too oblique).

Neither of those two works received much widespread
attention – I could be wrong, but I don’t think they ever opened commercially
here. On the other hand, the third film No
is one of the more prominent of recent months, and even received an Oscar
nomination for best foreign language film. It wouldn’t necessarily follow that
it’s the least interesting of the three, but overall I think that’s the case.
It’s extremely engrossing and skillful, and goes down very easily, but by the
same token, the thoughts it provokes are more familiar, and it slides from your
mind more quickly afterwards. In interviews, Larrain seems ready to move on to
other subject matter, so maybe there’s an element of conscious artistic
cleansing about it, of preparing to emerge from the darkness into the relative
light.

Don’t
Google the outcome

The film is set in 1988, when international pressure
forced Pinochet into holding a plebiscite on his continuing rule; a victory
would certainly be proclaimed as a guarantee of legitimacy, but it was unclear
whether the dictator would abide with a No vote, or whether the whole process
would be sufficiently rigged that this could never happen. During the run-up,
each side gets a nightly fifteen minute TV window to make its case, and Gael
Garcia Bernal plays Rene Saavedra, a cutting-edge advertising man (apparently
an amalgam of two real-life figures) pulled into helping to shape the No
campaign; his boss meanwhile works on the Pinochet team, even as the two
continue to collaborate on commercial assignments.

Larrain cannily shot the film using old video cameras
from the era, so that the archival footage (including the actual campaign
commercials) meshes seamlessly with the recreations. The image quality looks
grotty, but that alleviates a potential sense of over-slickness, and implies a
deep-rooted authenticity. The film doesn’t lack dramatic shape, but it’s
primarily about process and momentum, although with a recurring sense of
danger, driven by that doubt about Pinochet’s commitment to fairness, and
occasional moments when that crystallizes into visible threat.

In his Star
review, Peter Howell counsels: “Do yourself a favour and don’t Google the plebiscite’s
real-life outcome before you see the movie.” Which somewhat sums up an
ambiguity at the heart of No – does
one best engage with history by artificially limiting one’s knowledge of it? In
the film, the question swirls around the ethics of building a campaign around
images of future happiness, rather than in denouncing Pinochet for his crimes against
humanity. Gloominess, the premise goes, doesn’t sell political change any more
than it sells soda. But there’s a counter-question: aren’t qualities as
fundamental as freedom and justice fatally compromised, if gained through
anything less than the truth? Put another way, to what extent does the end
justify the means – and, even, since the same question gets asked about rebels
and freedom fighters (or, if you’re on the other side, terrorists), to what
extent is such media manipulation a form of strategic violence?

Chilean Mad Men

The question obviously has broad
application – I’d certainly argue for instance that Rob Ford’s disregard for
his responsibilities, and for any sane concept of appropriate leadership,
constitutes a form of violent assault on the city, all the more offensive
because it seems based more in pathology than in strategy. But ultimately, I
don’t think this train of thought is central to No’s effect. Howell mentions Mad
Men twice in his review, and concludes with the line: “Don Draper never had
to pitch a campaign this tough, or this important.” Likewise, the British
magazine Sight and Sound used the
film as a jumping off point for an essay titled Mad Men in the Movies, concluding that “advertising in the movies
is not so much a job as a mindset to be escaped, so that a new, more evolved
human being can emerge.” Fair enough, but it seems to me a job that’s already
unduly prominent in cinema compared to, you know, most normal jobs people have.
And anyway, on the scale of things that should matter about the long and
complex history of the Pinochet regime, I’m not sure how highly this aspect of
it ranks.

Even if it might be useful to watch this particular
film without knowing anything of the history, that can’t possibly be a
meaningful approach to engaging with these matters more broadly. Which goes
back to why I find No less gripping
and less intellectually galvanizing than Larrain’s preceding films. In saying
that, it might sound like I’m falling prey to a grim stereotyping whereby every
film about wretched times in history is only worthwhile if it focuses morbidly
and piously on that wretchedness. But my best rebuttal to that would merely be
to refer back to the highly distinctive excellence of Larrain’s two previous
films.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Married Life, directed by
Ira Sachs, is being advertised as a comedy. The title may suggest a tragedy to
some readers; the fact that I’m not ultimately sure in what camp to place the
film should probably count as a compliment. It’s set in 1949. Chris Cooper
plays Harry, long married to Pam (Patricia Clarkson), but now in love with a
much younger widow, Kay (Rachel McAdams). He confides in his best friend
Richard (Pierce Brosnan), an unmarried rake who soon develops his own designs
on Kay. Seeing no clear way to the new life he craves, Harry starts to dream of
getting Pam out of the way.

Other
Movies

Several reviews of Married
Life evoked Todd Haynes’ Far From
Heaven, as a better evocation of approximately the same era. Haynes’ film evoked
Hollywood norms (particularly as per the lush melodramas of Douglas Sirk),
while updating them…or maybe making them more honest, it’s rather difficult to
know which. It was at least as much about movies themselves as about “the
50’s,” much as his latest film I’m Not
There isn’t exactly “about” Bob Dylan (truer to say it’s “around” Bob
Dylan). Married Life looks initially
as if it intends to provide a window into a vanished era – it’s plainly a man’s
world, with an initial scene between Harry and Richard in one of those martini
and steak watering holes. But it quickly settles into a rather abstracted mode,
with the period flavour seldom fore-grounded, and with no particular apparent
aesthetic ambition.

I watch movies in bits and pieces as time allows, frequently
watching one while I have another in progress, and I love the accidental echoes
and juxtapositions resulting from this jumble of inputs. Just before watching Married Life I’d been rewatching Edward
Yang’s famous Yi Yi, and was thinking
that, although still marvelous, Yang’s film might be a little more strained
than I’d remembered. But then I read the fine essay by Kent Jones that
accompanies the DVD and decided I was taking too much for granted. Jones
eloquently highlights the grace and balance and luminosity of Yang’s film,
placing any minor cavils safely back in perspective. Well, that’s all for
another article. But thinking of Yi Yi
helped to bring out Married Life’s
extreme simplicity. Most scenes involve just two people, hardly ever more than
three; still and slow and rather airless, it barely seems attuned to Life,
married or otherwise.

Even more serendipitously, when I saw Sachs’ film I was in the
middle of watching Richard Quine’s 1965 comedy How to Murder your Wife. This has Jack Lemmon as a rich and happy
bachelor cartoonist who impulsively (i.e. drunkenly) marries a gorgeous
Italian, has her take over his life, and fantasizes via his syndicated strip
about killing her off; when she actually does disappear, he’s put on trial for
murder. In the remarkable finale, Lemmon proclaims his guilt and pleads
justifiable homicide, on the basis that acquitting him will be the one small
step for man (and I don’t mean mankind) that helps the wretched male claw back
some dignity. The (all-man) jury leaps to find him innocent and carries him
from the courtroom in triumph (in the end, naturally, she comes back and he
ends up with her regardless).

Murdering
Your Wife

The film is a satire of course, but really only admits to such in
its portrayal of the men (with Terry-Thomas, as Lemmon’s manservant – I told
you it was a different era – literally winking at the camera). Women are
categorically, shamelessly, juicily parodied, objectified, marginalized. Men
and women can’t communicate – emphasized big-time here since Lemmon’s new wife
doesn’t initially speak a word of English. It’s a remarkable creation – far
smoother, more literate and better acted than what passes now for mainstream
comedy, but astonishingly problematic. And, of course, helplessly revealing.

Which helped me to tune in to Married
Life’s peculiar avoidance of revelation, or even much exploration. Any
movie with “Life” in the title, though, seems to be advertising some ambition. But it’s hard here to
find orientation. Early on, we hear that Pam equates love only with sex, and is
skeptical of any deeper connection beyond that. We’re told several times that
Harry’s marriage has left him physically satisfied but emotionally deprived.
Richard suggests that this plight is ironic – that Harry might actually be in
the ideal male position. But this never gets much beyond surface positioning.
We don’t see anything of their sex life. Cooper gives an uninteresting,
recessive performance, and Clarkson seems emotionally more alive than he does.
And then Cooper doesn’t seem any more fired up with Kay than he does with Pam.
And the movie seems to be going out of its way not to make Kay at all
interesting either. What to make of all this?

I think in part, this is merely charting a filmmaker’s limitations
(Sachs’ previous feature, Forty Shades of
Blue, won a prize at Sundance – I haven’t seen it). And yet, the film
unquestionably exhibits a nicely perverse, if confounding sensibility. Too
consistently to be merely mis-stepping, it avoids expectations. For example,
the story is told in part by Richard’s voice over, implying initially that he
is to be the observer to a story centering on Harry. But without giving too
much away, much less happens to Harry than seems likely, and the story ends up
seeming more like Richard’s own. At the end, Richard suggests that we take
something away from all this about “the things we do for love.” At face value
it’s a bewildering wrap-up of what we’ve seen, unless “love” is synonymous with
“just going on.”

Under
the Influence

After those last few words, we watch through a window as a couple
rearranges the living room furniture after their evening guests have gone home.
Final association – it reminded me of the end of John Cassavetes’ Woman under the Influence, where the
Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands characters, after a film’s worth of trauma, settle
into their nightly routine. Love is a terrible gift in Cassavetes’ film, almost
proving itself only through its ability to destroy. It’s frightening and
exhilarating, whereas the end of Sachs’ film is depressing and profoundly
unsatisfactory. Maybe it ought to be called Married
Death.

This has elements of a fascinating ideological experiment, but you
can see I’m not sure what to make of the film. I’d like to think it’s a smart
exercise in perpetual misdirection, subtly toying with our expectations. Maybe
so, or maybe it just means that even a rather limited and failed film about
marriage will benefit from a century’s worth of filmic associations.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

I visited Hiroshima a few years ago, and found
it almost unbearably compelling and provocative. I remember being occupied in
particular by two intertwining impressions. One is that the peace museum and
accompanying infrastructure seemed old and in need of some rethinking and
regeneration; the second was that in focusing so specifically on an
anti-nuclear message, rather than a broader one about war and other human
travesties, the city seemed to limit its communicative power. Of course, these
are deliberate strategies – Hiroshima’s specific experience is so vast and
horrifying, it shouldn’t have to be about anything other than that (and might
occasionally become a political football if it was), and it shouldn’t have to
conform to modern concepts of slickness. If we can’t go there and engage
directly with that experience for what it was, then what good are we? And yet,
that’s the state of things. It remains among the most elusive of twentieth
century tragedies – there’s no societal consensus for instance on whether
dropping the bomb was a strategic necessity, the only way of forcing a Japanese
surrender that might otherwise be years away, or a quasi-criminal display of
force, designed primarily to assert American capacity and will as the post-war
world took shape.

Legacy of Hiroshima

No doubt that’s partly because the
history we know is primarily written by the winners, and yet it’s always seemed
remarkable that Japan renewed itself so thoroughly after WW2, as if the psychic
blast had been almost as compelling as the physical one. But maybe its capacity
to move on was at the cost of embedding incoherences that would serve it poorly
in the long run (leading for instance to its current demographic problems and
extreme economic imbalances). If you take the country’s post-war cinema as a
guide, you can certainly find evidence galore of malaise and embedded trauma
(for instance in the work of Nagisa Oshima or Shohei Imamura). The works of the
period’s best-known filmmakers though – Yasujro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira
Kurosawa – rarely mention Hiroshima, although one might detect it pulsing in
the subtext, adding to the tragedy for instance of some of the societally-imposed,
emotionally self-destructive compromises in Ozu’s films.

How could one ever face Hiroshima head-on
without causing all conventional narrative to dissolve? The question runs
through Alain Resnais’ 1959 Hiroshima mon
amour, an official classic of cinema. It entered my mind again recently
because of the renewed attention on its star Emmanuelle Riva, with her Oscar
nomination for this year’s Amour. In Hiroshima mon amour, her first film, she
plays an actress, making a film on the subject of “peace,” who meets a Japanese
architect (both are unnamed in the film) and goes to bed with him. She’s
scheduled to leave the following day, but he follows her around, trying to
persuade her to stay. She tells him that during the war she had an affair with
a German soldier posted in her small French town, as a result of which she and
her family were shamed. As the film ends, their fate is unresolved, and so is
our relationship to them. They mesmerize us as they do each other, but there’s
no reason this encounter should amount to anything: they’ve both acknowledged
they’re happy with their spouses and their regular lives. And what does it
matter anyway, when she’s so identified with the legacy of murderous European
chaos, and he’s so identified with the recent tragedy of Japan?

Displaced love story

The film begins on a stunning evocation
of their intertwined bodies, covered in what might be ash from a bomb blast,
and for the first twenty minutes or so denies us any easy point of access to
the story – it gives us glimpses of the lovers, but the majority of what we see
is Hiroshima: the areas rebuilt and not, the museum, reenactments of the
aftermath. On the soundtrack, they conduct what might be pillow talk, except
that it consists of a vertiginously abstract conversation on what she did or
didn’t see in and glean from Hiroshima. Resnais’ broad purpose is immediately
clear – to expose the inadequacy of conventional expressions of sorrow or
sympathy for the events and their victims, to demonstrate the limitations of
cinematic conventions in representing its reality and legacy (all we see of the
film on which the actress is working is a staged rally in which marchers parade
a series of conventionally well-meaning, ineffectual slogans).

But the film is also a love story. On the
one hand, it’s a very displaced one – no names, no shared past, no obvious history,
no connection at all, especially when you learn that Japanese actor Eiji Okada
didn’t speak French at all and learned all his lines phonetically (you’d never
know it though). But at the same time, it carries a classic iconic fatalism, so
that you might almost relax into it as you would into a film noir. Riva, of
course, seems even more fascinating with our newly-obtained hindsight – not a
great beauty necessarily (he even remarks on her ugliness at one point) and
sometimes you might think somewhat over-emphatic in some of her expressions and
line readings. It works though – despite the rejection of conventional realism,
she conveys the sense of a human experience, with all the mild glitches, the
ongoing rebalancing of perceptions and reactions.

Still going

I doubt too many viewers would feel the
passion for Hiroshima mon amour that
they do for their favourite films, but then this too seems necessary to its
effect – passion would necessarily be rooted in a form of simplification. The
film demands that we be at something of a remove, not knowing entirely how to
react or what to feel, second-guessing and contradicting ourselves as the world
continues to do in its engagement with war and death. It feels like a film of
its time, but few films of 1959 dissolve so effectively the barrier between
then and now. Especially as Riva just demonstrated so compellingly the folly of
ever thinking any aspect of cinema history might be closed down.

And Resnais, now in his nineties, is
still making boundary-pushing films – most recently just last year, although
his focus has become less on representing history than on the ambiguities of
human experience, and the boundaries between art and life. As for Hiroshima,
well, how often would an average person ever hear it mentioned now? And if we
were to fight that disregard, what exactly is the nature of the memory for
which we’d be fighting? Even in Hiroshima
mon amour, little more than a decade after the event, the lovers struggle
to determine whether its backdrop to their love affair somehow elevates it, or
rather renders it insignificant. The struggle is still enthralling, and noble,
even if you can hardly imagine it being enacted now.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

A
proposition: the big fast food companies serve no good purpose whatsoever –
their influence on society is entirely, unremittingly malign. During the 50
years or so since the rise of McDonald’s, the industry, in conjunction with its
paid political hacks, has been more responsible than any other for bastardizing
democratic values; for disrupting communities through unremitting, if not
crazed emphasis on cost control, profit maximization and product
standardization. The industry markets itself shamelessly to children, a
sleepless pusher selling a brazen image of itself as some kind of non-stop fun
festival. Except at the corporate executive level, everyone in the chain of
supply and influence gets screwed, turned either into a minimum wage prisoner
or else into a deadened borderline addict.

No one
claims the food is good for you – McDonald’s itself cited its well-known health
risks in defending itself against a product liability suit. Sure, it tastes
pretty good up to a point, although surely not to the point that for so many
people, it should so completely crowd out the alternatives. You want to think
that if fast food freaks could only step outside themselves for a second, and
look hard at the banality of their daily or three-times-weekly trudge to their
banal overlit troughs – surely that’s all it would take to break it. But that’s
easy for me to say. People only have so much in the way of mental and financial
resources, and the chains prey on weakness. Worse, they set out to create it.

No good purpose

Sound
pretty angry don’t I. Mark that down to my reading (during the hours spent
whiling away a week on jury duty) Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, fast on the heels of Paul Hawken’s The Ecology ofCommerce. I’m not sure you
could put together a more depressing pair of page turners: both books are
completely convincing, completely rational, and leave no doubt that we’re on
the road to hell. But you’ll note that I’m continuing with my life regardless,
albeit with a bit more unformed sense that I ought to be doing something. As
the recent documentary The Corporation
recounts, one American CEO experienced an epiphany after reading the Hawken
book, awoke to a sense of himself as an amoral plunderer, and set out to remake
his company (an effort that continues). But few of us possess such a direct axis
of influence; lacking an appropriate arena for our anger, we’re likely to let
it soften into depression. I say this with no pleasure at myself.

Morgan
Spurlock’s new documentary Super Size Me,
which could almost be a movie version of Schlosser’s book (but isn’t) is
getting lots of deserved attention for its take on McDonald’s, and at least
amounts to doing something. Spurlock
came up with a solid gimmick: for thirty days, he would eat there and nowhere
else, trying everything on the menu at least once and accepting the Super Size
option whenever offered. At the start a team of doctors checks him out, all of who
testify to his excellent physical shape. Initially the diet makes him
physically sick (one of the film’s centrepieces is its gross-out vomit scene);
once he gets past that, he’s plagued by shifting feelings of malaise. The
doctors are stunned at the speed of his physical decline; by the end of the
month he’s gained 25 pounds, has looming liver problems, and he’s scoring worse
than before on virtually every measure. Not least of all, as pointed out by his
girlfriend Alex (a vegan chef), in the area of sexual functioning.

Super Size Me

Spurlock’s primary
focus, obviously, is on health issues (the movie’s dominant visual image, other
than the McDonald’s symbol, is the big fat American ass). He acknowledges that
the experiment is exaggerated, but the basic point seems incontrovertible: the
food is bad. He’s an amiable presence with a deadpan sense of humour;
distinctly less hectoring than a Michael Moore. The film, interspersed with
peppy graphics and an overall jaunty technique, touches on the other links in
the McDonald’s chain of horror, but only briefly. Spurlock doesn’t talk to any
politicians, and although in the end he’s planning a Moore-style visit to
corporate headquarters, when they stall him he seems to back down.

Schlosser’s
book describes the genesis of McDonald’s as an outgrowth of the can-do
entrepreneurial spirit that flourished in America after WW2. The combination of
new roads, new technology, mass media and an upwardly mobile public opened the
door to a new spin on a low-grade food source. What could be wrong with that?
McDonald’s corporate image-building, and the effort it puts behind political
manna such as tax cuts and corporate subsidiaries, still return to that same
ideal of industry and imagination, as though the company were still taking baby
steps. But it’s a big lie. The company’s just about bled America dry. Hence the
importance of global expansion, and exporting the whole pernicious agenda. It
was recently reported that after just one generation of McDonald’s, Japanese
men in their 30’s have the worst obesity statistics ever recorded there.

Sorrow over anger

Currently,
McDonalds seems to be on the retreat, not least of all because of the film
itself. The company denies Spurlock’s film had anything to do with its recent
elimination of the Super Size option, but no one believes it. But this is an
incremental climb-down at best, and the current fad for supposedly “healthy”
food, channeled through the wretchedly weak-minded Atkins craze, doesn’t exactly
seem like a revolution. In particular, buying a “healthy” meal at a fast food
joint isn’t much of a step in the right direction.

Actually,
even though she’s his girlfriend, Alex the vegan chef seems a bit marginal to
the overall direction of Super Size Me
– there’s a certain ironic distance to the depiction of the organic meal she
serves on the eve of the experiment, and of the “detox” program she works out
for him when it’s over. But that’s fair enough. Spurlock isn’t an idealist –
he’s a pretty ordinary guy, and his film’s all the more convincing because of
it. In the end, it has a “more in sorrow than in anger” kind of feeling. Having
made his point, you get the impression his subsequent movies will be about
something else entirely. I don’t blame him. But here’s the lousy thing. However
depressing Schlosser’s book and Spurlock’s movie may be, the effect of reading
The Ecology of Commerce is even
worse.

I’ve written here before that I wish I spent more time
watching Canadian films, or more precisely perhaps, I wish I were the kind of
person who wanted to spend more time watching Canadian films. I suppose I see
as much of our homegrown contemporary cinema as any averagely interested viewer
does (that is, very little of it) but I haven’t viewed much at all of what was
made in the 70’s and earlier. I know a lot of it is widely regarded as
terrible, but still, I’d like to know for myself. The reason I never get round
to it I think, leaving aside the even more overwhelming histories of cinema in
other countries, is that I only arrived here in 1994, and never developed that
much of a sense for the Canada that preceded that. I don’t think I really even wanted to – I wanted to come in here as
a new person, with as little mental baggage as possible, and maybe it suited me
to regard the country in the same way, as something that only vaguely existed
before I arrived.

Goin’ Down the
Road

I’ve always lived in the same neighbourhood, around
the St Lawrence market, and as anyone will tell you, it’s a little shocking how
much has changed. Just a few years ago, you’d look in a particular direction
and see just one tall(ish) building – now it’s all but crowded out by three
taller ones, with more on the way. I often try to remember what was in a
particular place before the Gleam Palace, or whatever might now be standing
there, got built, but I usually can’t picture it; whether it was some old
building, or a parking lot, or a patch of deadly quicksand, I guess to me it
was all just forgettable connective material between major intersections, parks
and bars. Obviously I’m pragmatic by nature, but sometimes this lack of memory
feels self-defeating, too weightless, as if I’m unduly increasing my chances of
waking up one day and realizing it was all just a digital simulacrum. But then
I’m not sure I’d really care anyway, as long as the illusion remained
satisfying. You see, I’ve always been too good at rationalizing past things and
moving on, the opposite of what it takes to attain a sense of place and
community.

Donald Shebib’s 1970 film Goin’ Down the Road has long been an exception to my ignorance of
our cinematic heritage – I first saw it not long after arriving here I think,
and then watched it again recently. It’s about two Cape Breton buddies, Joey
and Pete, who drive all the way to Toronto in the hope of catching a better
break. Pete, the bigger dreamer of the two, never gets anything going remotely
equal to his dreams. Joey gets married and seems more inclined to settle for
less, but in the end, he can’t even sustain that much.

A national
right

My favourite moment in the film comes near the start,
when they enter Toronto from the East, and we see the downtown core much as I’m
looking at it right now from my window, except that virtually none of the high-rises
(or the CN Tower) exists yet. At the time, the shot presumably embodied a sense
of majestic, abundant possibility; viewed with hindsight, it’s almost quaint, a
city that thought it was running but wasn’t even crawling. Of course, the same
goes for much about that era – the film shows the then-new world of pop culture
(Sam the Record Man!) and colour TV and suchlike, but how primitive it all
seems now...

In his seminal book Mondo Canuck (which I devoured when it came out in 1996), Geoff
Pevere says Shebib’s film “established the Canadian male as one of the most
persistently impotent and unappealing characters in world cinema” and suggests
it “promoted losing as a distinctive national right.” But at least to my eyes,
the movie never seems to be reflecting on Canadian-ness, but rather on regional
and economic predestination: Pete and Joey may never have had a real shot at
being winners, transplanting themselves with so few resources and skills, but
if they’d always been in Toronto (or if the Alberta oil boom had already
started), who knows? To me it’s not so much about the national right to be a
loser as the folly, for guys in their shoes, at that time, of even thinking
there’s a nation.

On repeated viewing, it’s more visible how for all its
impact, Goin’ Down the Road always
put a premium on narrative efficiency (it was just an hour and a half long).
This became all the clearer a couple of years ago, when Shebib decided to make
a sequel. Paul Bradley, who played Joey, was long dead, so Down the Road Again focuses on Pete (still played by Doug McGrath),
now elderly and retired in BC after making a career in the postal service,
making the journey in reverse to tie up some loose ends and scatter Joey’s
ashes. The film invents a whole new back story for why they left home and for
what happens at the end of the first film; Pete crosses paths with Joey’s
daughter, and his lost love, and the son he never knew he had, who turns out to
be…oh, never mind…

Down the Road
Again

“It’s very
Dickensian in how things are revealed,” said Shebib at the time, but that’s a
sadly undeserved assessment – its contrivances seem largely ridiculous,
especially when falling into place with such dubious ease. The film pays lip
service to the weight of the past, but has little sense of real pain or regret,
and the sense of place that was so fundamental to the first film is entirely
absent (much of it takes place back in Nova Scotia, but it doesn’t seem any
filming actually took place there). And again, for a film that traverses the
country, and tries to excavate and reclaim the secrets of two lives, Shebib
seems overly concerned with tidiness and concision (it runs just 84 minutes).

At the very least, you’d think seeing Down the Road Again ought to add
something to one’s appreciation of the first film, but I don’t know if it
really does. Would it enhance your appreciation of the memory of an esteemed
old building, to visit the new condo tower erected in its place? Maybe it
depends on your sensitivity to ghosts and echoes – it might only dilute the
memories you’d managed to hang on to. I know cinema can’t be analogized with
architecture beyond a certain point. And yet, I’ll tell you, when I watch
Canadian cinema, whether good or bad, I feel a pleasant sense of gravity, as if
that very act roots me a little more firmly and productively in a neighbourhood
I’ve never paid enough attention to.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

About three quarters of the way through Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, the
protagonist Otilia sits at the dinner table of her boyfriend’s parents. Her
best friend is locked inside a hotel room across the city, waiting for her
abortion to take effect. Preoccupied and desperate, there only because of being
guilted into it, Otilia barely says a word as the parents and their guests
chatter away. Her boyfriend sits silently behind her, his mind only on getting
her into his bedroom. It’s a crammed frame – this is 1980’s Romania, and every
interior we see is either dingy or cluttered or both. The shot goes on and on,
certainly for longer than five minutes. It’s fascinating as a feat of
composition and acting; immensely suspenseful; and deeply unsettling for how it
crystallizes the theme of confinement that runs through the film.

4
Months, 3 Weeks…

The previous week I watched American
Gangster, which is always entertaining, logistically impeccable and highly
sophisticated in a host of ways. But Mungiu’s film reminds you of the essential
soullessness of such behemoths. There’s nothing in American Gangster that pulls you up, makes you momentarily happy
(the material’s bleakness notwithstanding) by its creative elegance; and if
director Ridley Scott ever came up with anything in that vein, he’d be
hard-pressed to preserve it through the layers of process surrounding him. More
and more, I wonder after such movies why I don’t transfer my primary allegiance
to theatre or music or something. Then I see a film like 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, and I remember.

Otilia and Gabita are roommates in a Bucharest dormitory, and in
the opening scenes Mungiu traces that community’s interconnectivity – communal
showers and endless small borrowings and transactions and favours. By our own
notions of adequate space and privacy and resources it looks awful, but in
retrospect comes to seem like a relative refuge. Gabita is pregnant, and
they’ve made contact with an abortionist. Gabita can’t handle it, so Otilia
takes on all the logistics – booking the necessary hotel room, going to the
initial rendezvous. Often feeling almost as if shot in real time, the film
sticks close to her - one could argue it focuses on the wrong person, but that
comes to be an aspect of its tragedy, how individual trauma displaces itself.

As I said, the subject is abortion (illegal here, with both the
practitioner and the woman facing imprisonment), and I can’t recall a film that
illustrates certain aspects of this procedure more clearly. But I don’t think
one can tell whether Mungiu is “pro-life” or “pro-choice”, as the terms go
(needless to say, the film’s an instant indictment of the deranged U.S.
debate). It’s wrenching that such a procedure should ever be necessary; but so
would be the consequences of its unavailability. I mentioned the theme of
confinement – it’s implicit in the desolate settings, the inadequate living
spaces and personal resources, the weight of bureaucracy and scrutiny. But for
women there’s the added trap of biology. We never find out how Gabita got
pregnant, but Otilia later assails her boyfriend for his carelessness the last
time they slept together. You get the impression that a balanced sexual
relationship is barely possible in this society – the power imbalance, and the
disproportionate sense of consequences, is just too great.

It’s a depressing film, but realistically so, and it’s an
anthropological eye-opener. The film won the top prize at Cannes, and based on
what we’ve seen so far this year would be worthy of the Oscar. I mentioned
earlier the sense of suspense, and it might sound as if that would only cheapen
the material, but nothing about the picture feels contrived. It’s an amazing
debut for Mungiu, and afterwards I kept mulling over its subtleties. At the
very end, there’s a juxtaposition between the nasty physicality of abortion and
a horrible-looking plate of brains, liver and the like. You can imagine
Tarantino coming up with that echo, and emphasizing it through a fancy zoom or
split screen. In Mungiu’s film, it’s subtle enough that you might miss it. But
if you don’t, it’s the final grace note, extending the oppression to include
the food chain, suggesting how such conditions perpetuate themselves through
internalization.

More
Fall Movies

James Gray’s We Own the
Night, set in 1988, sets up two brothers from an NYPD family – one goes
into uniform, the other manages a nightclub, until he cross paths with a
Russian drug dealer and starts moving back toward the fold. The film is
somewhat reminiscent of the sprawling urban dramas of someone like Sidney
Lumet, but feels consistently thin and fuzzy – Gray just doesn’t manage to
bring much layering to it. A few scenes have a vague poetry to them, but
there’s a constant sense of thwarted ambition. Joaquin Phoenix, whose features
and acting style alike seem to be getting fleshier, isn’t really an adequate
focal point.

American
Gangster, just to flesh my earlier comments out a bit, attracts broadly
similar reservations. The gangster is real-life 70’s drug dealer Frank Lucas,
played here by Denzel Washington, contrasted with Russell Crowe as the cop on
his trail. Scott is one of the all-time great movie-making generals,
marshalling complex and sprawling material into shape as if whipping a
recalcitrant horse. But you pay a price for that, and American Gangster increasingly feels as if it’s taking place in a
vacuum, with no more than passable sense of time and place and little moral
complexity. Washington is always respectable of course, but doesn’t illuminate
Lucas’ complicated worldview very much. At one point the movie leaps from
Thanksgiving at the Lucas house to a joltingly raw montage of the junkies whose
exploitation is paying for all this; it’s over in a few seconds, and as if
shocked by its own daring, the film never dabbles in that mode again.

Control/Real
Life

Control is about Joy
Division’s Ian Curtis, who killed himself in 1980 at the age of 23, on the eve
of the band’s first trip to the US. Already married with a kid, and having an
affair with a far more exotic Belgian journalist, epileptic and chronically
short of money for all his burgeoning fame, Curtis simply couldn’t find a way
to make all the pieces fit together. Directed by Anton Corbijn (a renowned rock
photographer who knew Curtis well) in pristine black and white, this is a
deliberately downbeat but highly skilled telling; you’ve probably never seen a
rock biopic so immune to the thrill of performing and all that goes with it. It
allows us a general sense of Curtis’ inspirations and frustrations, but it’s
ineffably mysterious, with a sullied, thwarted hope at its centre.

Right at the other end of the spectrum, Peter Hedges’ Dan in Real Life stars Steve Carell as
an advice columnist who diagnoses other people’s problems much more fluently
than his own. He’s a widower with three challenging daughters, who falls in
love with exotic Juliette Binoche during a family reunion, not realizing that
she’s already attached to his less deserving brother (Dane Cook). So I think in
four lines there I probably already mentioned three or four premises that
belong solely to the world of movies, and I was just getting started. It’s all
smoothly done, but that’s all it is.

When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo won last year’s Sight
and Sound poll of the greatest films ever made, replacing Citizen Kane (which had held the top
place since 1962), it seemed to represent the triumph of a fundamentally
different idea of cinema. Kane is
Orson Welles’ most classically “perfect” film – naturally, one might assess its
qualities higher or lower than those of other pictures, but I don’t think
there’d be a lot of disagreement about the essential nature of those qualities:
its technical mastery, formal innovation, crackerjack dialogue and so forth.
Although the film wasn’t universally acclaimed when it came out in 1941, some
people at the time instantly noted it as a new milestone in cinema, and it was
nominated for many Oscars (it only won for its screenplay though). Even those
who don’t venerate Welles as a director might concede Kane draws additional eerie power from the way it seems to diagnose
its maker’s future trajectory (as has been told over and over, not always in a
way that’s very fair to Welles subsequent achievements, he was twenty-six when
he made it, and his stature in Hollywood almost immediately started to slip). Kane remains a film one bows to, and it
remained at number two in the voting.

Vertigo’s rise

On the other hand, when Vertigo came out in 1958, at the height of Hitchcock’s fame and
popular success, it was regarded as a disappointment, if not a complete flop,
and received only a couple of minor Oscar nominations. When I was getting into
movies in the early 80’s, it had many passionate followers, but lagged far
behind Psycho and others of his films
in mainstream awareness and acceptance. Actually, for a long while, you
couldn’t even see Vertigo unless you
had some privileged kind of access to it – it was withdrawn from release for
over ten years, reappearing in 1984. It first appeared on the Sight and Sound top ten in 1982 (all the
more impressively for being generally unavailable), climbing since then from
seventh to fourth to second to first, like a rolling stone gathering converts.
But I also recall seeing it with an audience – I think it was at the
Cinematheque Ontario – where people laughed at it in various places, and I
don’t mean the kind of boorish, self-indulgent laughter that makes you want to
get up and hit them: I mean they outright didn’t get it, and thought it was
corny.

I guess I’ve never fallen entirely under the film’s
spell myself, because until I thought to revisit it in the wake of the poll, I
hadn’t seen it for almost a decade. I can still imagine many viewers, coming to
the movie cold, being mystified about the source of its stature. The plot (I
don’t think it’s relevant to worry about “spoilers” in discussing such a famous
work) follows Scottie (James Stewart), an ex-policeman with acrophobia, engaged
by an old acquaintance to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), whom the
husband suspects of being under some quasi-supernatural influence. Scottie
falls in love with her, but then takes the moral blame for her death when she
commits suicide by jumping off a bell tower, after his vertigo prevents him
from running up after her.

Madeleine and
Judy

Later on, wandering through his life like a ghost, he
meets another woman, Judy, who closely resembles Madeleine, and fixates on
remaking her, to embody his lost love exactly. In fact, Judy is the Madeleine he knew – the real wife
was killed by her husband and thrown off the tower, with Scottie manipulated
into providing perfect cover. When he realizes this at the end, it seems to mark
the end of Scottie’s trauma, and to allow the start of a fully aware new love
with Judy, but then a tragic accident takes her from him as well.

It’s hopelessly easy not just to criticize aspects of
this basic plot, but also to list numerous gauche or unsubtle aspects of its
execution. The impact of Vertigo, I
think, is as the supreme example of the medium’s capacity to create a whole
that’s greater than the apparent sum of its parts: it’s raw and needy and
troubling to an extent that defies rational explanation. It’s common to cite it
as a kind of commentary on watching films – Scottie loses himself in the
illusion that’s created for him, and then all but goes mad trying to create it.
But I think Peter Bradshaw is right when he says such readings “cannot account
for a delirious excess that paradoxically borders on abstraction.” The film is
very specifically set in San Francisco, in real locations, and is highly
tangible in its details – it starts with a close-up of a hand on a rail, and
demands that we focus on aspects of jewellery, hairstyles, costumes. Yet at the
same time, almost nothing about it is firmly of this world – it seems to posit
a state beyond the physical, of pure watching and dreaming and of movement
untethered to a mundane purpose, but then almost everything it presents is
based either in misapprehension or in a lie. It becomes almost religiously
ritualistic, a note emphasized in its final scene, but without any simple
doctrinal pay-offs or compensations. The film’s images – often so carefully
composed that you can almost feel the movement deconstructing into a string of
photographs - have an unusual gravity, an unnerving sense that they had to exist in this precise form, and
that we might find greater self-definition in losing ourselves within them.

The greatest
film?

Although the plot has an inherently erotic aspect to
it, Scottie is desexualized, almost infantilized at times; he seems unaware of
the extent of his friend Midge’s interest in him, and later insists to Judy
that he doesn’t want anything more from her than to spend lots of time together
(which she describes as “not very complimentary”).Hitchcock in retrospect thought it a flaw
that Stewart and Novak were so far apart in age (some twenty-five years), but
it just serves to underscore the tragic impossibility of the whole thing.
Stewart seems at times as broken and vulnerable a man as you’ve ever seen on
the screen, which helps to position Vertigo
as a film for broken and vulnerable times, even as Bernard Herrmann’s
magnificent score – one of the most striking in all of cinema – suggests the
possibility of world-changing revelation.

Does that amount to the greatest film ever made? I
don’t think I would be tempted to put it on my own top ten list, nor any
Hitchcock film (although I haven’t thought about it carefully, Psycho may actually be my favourite of
them). But it may indeed be the picture that best represents the current state
of greatness in cinema, where mainstream films are mostly cold-minded
commercial products, and the films that matter dwell in the margins, where
technology and web communication allows localized obsessions to find nurturing
and reinforcement, and to flourish, while those not in the know would merely
yawn or laugh or them.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).